Free gmail, facebook type chat application using CSS, jQuery and PHP

Demo
Please load the following links in different browsers otherwise it wont work:

Sample Chat User Swadesh
Sample Chat User Vimla
Sample Chat User Brijesh

Introduction
This jQuery chat module enables you to integrate Gmail/Facebook style chat into your existing website.

Features
1. Gmail style bottom right display of chat boxes
2. Keeps chat boxes open and stores state (data) even when pages are browsed/refreshed similar to Facebook
3. Displays “Sent at…” after 3 minutes of inactivity
4. Displays “X says…” & blinks chat boxes when window is not in focus
5. Minimize and close chat boxes
6. Auto-scrolling of chat text
7. Auto-back-off polling policy (hits the server less-often when chat activity is low)
8. Extremely simple to integrate into existing site

Getting Started

You must first create a mySQL table as below (or import db.txt provided in project files)

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `chat` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `from` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `to` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `message` text NOT NULL,
  `sent` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
  `recd` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=539 ;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `users` (
  `uid` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `username` varchar(30) DEFAULT NULL,
  `password` varchar(30) DEFAULT NULL,
  `email` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
  `gender` varchar(8) NOT NULL,
  `dob` varchar(16) NOT NULL,
  `phone` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `profile_image` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`uid`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=21 ;

--
-- Dumping data for table `users`
--

INSERT INTO `users` (`uid`, `username`, `password`, `email`, `gender`, `dob`, `phone`, `profile_image`) VALUES
(1, 'Swadesh', 'pass1', 'itswadesh@gmail.com', '', '', '', ''),
(2, 'Brijesh', 'pass1', 'brijesh@gmail.com', '', '', '', ''),
(3, 'Vimla', 'pass1', 'vimla@gmail.com', '', '', '', '');

Add the following scripts to your page template

<code><script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/chat.js"></script>
</code>

Add the following CSS to your page

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="css/chat.css" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="css/screen.css" /><!--[if lte IE 7]>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="css/screen_ie.css" />
<![endif]-->

Edit chat.php and set your database parameters and try your website.

For better understanding, load 3 different browsers (internet explorer, firefox, safari) and point them to samplea.php, sampleb.php and samplec.php.

Click on “chat with Vimla” link and watch the chat functionality come alive!

Inorder to integrate your existing website, you must place all your content between the “main_container” div tag.

Browser Compatibility
1. Firefox 2+
2. Internet Explorer 6+
3. Safari 2+
4. Opera 9+